Vimeo Releases HTML5 Video Player

New Universal Player detects browser capabilities, broadcasts in HTML5, Flash or native.

Popular video streaming website Vimeo announced the release of the Universal Player. The embeddable player automatically detects browser capabilities and subsequently delivers the best video for the device its being displayed on. The Universal Player supports Flash, native playback and HTML5.

While the first two formats were already supported by Vimeo, the inclusion of HTML5 support allows Vimeo content to be played on mobile devices with the appropriate codec and video definition. The embedded player will support h.264 and WebM. H.264 has been the default HTML5 codec, but the addition of Google's recently opened WebM, which will be baked into Android 3.0 is a thoughtful inclusion.

"The new embeddable code is highly scalable and allows us to continue to add support as new browsers and devices are released, for example serving HTML5 to IE9 and our Flash mobile player to Android phones running Flash 10.1," said Andrew Pile, Vice President of Product and Development for Vimeo.